Ventricles: Season 1, Episode 1: Telling Time

How have humans kept track of time? What technologies have they developed to tell time, and how have they been influenced by religious and scientific cultures? In this episode,Dr. Sara Schechner, a historian of astronomy and an artist who has made sundials herself, speaks about the history of timekeeping, and how timekeeping technologies have shaped people’s sense of time. We also hear from Dr. Avner Wishnitzer about how some people’s sense of time changed with the introduction of modern institutions, creating new “temporal cultures.”

Dr. Sara Schechner is the David P. Wheatland Curator of the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, Harvard University. She is a historian of science, specializing in material culture and the history of astronomy.

Audio credits: Special thanks to Tom Roush for use of his song, “My Grandfather’s Clock”; to the Ottoman History Podcast for use of their episode “Time and Temporal Culture in the Ottoman Empire”; and The Overseas Ensemble, a collaboration between composer Paed Conca and Sarigama, for use of their music

Bibliography:

Borst, Arno. The Ordering of Time from the Ancient Computus to the Modern Computer, trans. Andrew Winnard. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Dohrn-van Rossum, Gerhard. History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders, trans. Thomas Dunlap. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Hannah, Robert. Time in Antiquity. London and New York: Routledge, 2009.